Dynamic Disk partition corruption

jackluo923

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Mar 12, 2007
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I have 2 disks, 1 80GB Maxtor and 1 40GB maxtor hard drive. I've configured them into dynamic drive in windows xp. 1 partition is C:/ which hold my operating system and few important data and D:/ is a Raid 0 section for games and pagefile. This setup has been working for 6 month. Yesterday, a friend of mine downloaded a file on my computer and got infected by a virus, thus corrupted the boot sector. The system had a BSOD and restarted after few minutes. So, i got my copy of windows xp disk and booted from it. From there i chose to repair my windows, and i typed in fixboot in C:/ drive. After 2 seconds, the screen says boot sector written successfully, or something like that. So i just rebooted and see if windows was fixed. Unfourtunaly, after the bios posted, the screen turned to black and only these words appeared on the screen, "Boot invalid ( or something close to taht). Then i decided to install another copy of windows xp on another spare disk 10GB and hoping to recover those data on the old dynmaic drives. But after i logged into a fresh copy of windows xp, one of the partition in the dynamic drive's size was changed from 40GB to 10mb. That is the partition where i wrote a new bootsector in. The only file in that partition was named " ?“Ë". The size is 1kb.
I opened Computer managment and went into disk managment section, there are 2 dynamic disks, 40GB and 80GB and a basic disk 10GB ( where my fresh copy of windows is on ). The dynamic disk diagram on the bottom all show the correct partition size. But when i looked on the top, I see that E:/drive ( used to be C:/) was Layout:simple Type:dynamic File System: Fat Capacity: 10mb Free space: 10mb Faulty: no.

Is it possible to convert the E:/ drive back to NTFS file system without formatting the drive and recover the existing data on the disk? If yes, what tools would i need to buy in order to to this job?

Many Great Thanks in advance
 

leexgx

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you realy should not use Dynamic disks

Stop messing with the disk (like checkdisk, Fixboot was an very bad idea did you even know what that command was going to do? BSOD probery not related to the virus problery an driver that got loaded) get NTFSGetdataback and that scan the disk for files and recover them (beware its shareware it does not Tell you after scan has fnished you need to Buy it is good tho recovered loads of files with mine) some other users in here probly have some other tools as well
 

rninneman

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Windows does not allow you to convert a dynamic disk back to basic. (There may be utilities out there that can do it, but I would use one at this point because you may make your problem worse.) I would try a few things. When you boot the WIndows XP CD into the recovery console, try the FIXMBR command too. If that is unsuccessful, boot the XP CD again and proceed past the recovery console as if you were going to install Windows. It will scan for an existing installation. If it finds your damaged installation, it should give you the option to repair it if the problem is not too severe. This can work in many situations. If neither works, get a hold of a data recovery program like Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro or File Recovery Pro. They have the ability to look at the raw sectors to recover data. Good luck.

Ryan
 

jackluo923

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Thanks,,, NTFS GDB worked worked on C:/ drive but didn't work on D:/ drive. Because D:/ drive is striped using dynamic disk, thus NTFS GDB only chose random data.

rninneman said:
unsuccessful, boot the XP CD again and proceed past the recovery console as if you were going to install Windows.

When I booted the Xp cd and proceeded past the rocovery console as if i was going to isntall windows, windows did not seach for existing windows. I wouldn't even let me reinstall windows unless I reformat the existing drive which would cause me to lose data.

I'ill try the Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro or File Recovery Pro. [/list]
 

leexgx

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try not to use dynamic disks next time for raid use motherboard RAID or get an PCI raid card

just make sure the tools you are useing are Reading the data not fixing any thing as if any thing gets overwriten it can be lost for good

and the RAID 0 dynamic is most likey lost as Most of the files are half on each disks and unless windows will at least list Mount them you not be able to get data off them (Disk recovery norm looks at each disk not the windows raid set if thay are no longer connected)